Enquiry Management for Teams

Feature

Enquiry Management for Teams is a new web feature which allows you to manage enquiries to multi-instructor schools, dealing with them appropriately and efficiently.  This improves customer service and broadens your control of incoming business from enquiry to student, allowing more oversight of their overall learning journey and giving you as a business owner more opportunity to grow your business.

What’s in an Enquiry?

Every enquiry to your driving school is an opportunity for new business, even if you can’t fulfil the requirement at that moment in time.  Creating a comprehensive enquiry record, allowing you to decide, in an instant, whether you want to accept or discard the enquiry and be able to do that as well as passing it to one of your instructors easily is essential.

You want to keep track of all your enquiries and be able to see at a glance where a specific one is at.  You want to be able to take that enquiry and process it efficiently and accurately first time, every time.

When I was looking for my current vehicle I decided not to get another lease car but opted to buy one instead, my lovely VW Polo.  My thinking was that I would continue to teach manual for about 5 years and then swap my teaching to automatic whilst keeping my car and leasing an automatic for the remainder of my time as an instructor.  I would keep my VW Polo as my car because I like it so much – did I mention that?

To be honest, this was a bit of a gamble because whilst we all know that the drift towards electric and therefore automatic vehicles is constant and irresistable, I didn’t really have any idea how long that would take and the fact that the government keep moving the deadlines show that they don’t either.  Ultimately we probably will all be driving electric cars but it may well not happen in my lifetime.

What I needed was an enquiry management system so that I could keep track of all the enquiries I wasn’t able to fulfil at that time.  Then I would be able to identify when shifting my business to ‘automatic only’ made business sense.  Far better than a piece of paper that I would then lose or keeping a rough idea in my head – which, these days, would stay there for about as long as an available test slot!

So what else do I get?

Consider what enquirers say when they contact you.  Do you have any space (in your diary)?  Do you have any female instructors?  Do you do automatic?  Do you cover ‘location’ (somewhere in the middle of nowhere)?  If you are an independent instructor, you should be able to answer these without too much of a problem but if you have a school with 20 instructors, you might need to check.  Then you get the more extreme requests such as “I’ve got my test on Tuesday, do you have a car I can use?” or “I want to book some lessons from June 18th next year, can I do that?” (Yes I have, genuinely, had one that was 8 months ahead…)

Enquiry Management for Teams makes all of that a whole lot easier.  You can search on postcode or transmission type and you can also see your instructors’ diaries at a click to identify whether they have any capacity.  You can see those enquirers that have tests booked and see all enquiries by date so you know who wants lessons when.  You can also prioritise students if you want to bring them to the top of the list.

What if…

… one of my instructors says no?

You can simply transfer the student back to the school or directly to a different instructor.  Furthermore, we’ll keep track of their journey through your school, no matter how many times they change instructor.  The integrity of your data and the traceability that gives you is one of our founding principles and we have maintained it through our transfer tracking facilities.

… one of my instructors leaves the school?

They’ll keep the student (unless you have an agreement with them that they won’t) and their history will be updated accordingly.

…and finally

We don’t believe in only doing half a job.  This is phase 1 of Enquiry Management specifically for multi-instructor schools.  Phase 2 is already in the works and will concentrate on an enquiry form for you to include on your website to take enquiries directly into the app.  Following on its heels will be enquiry management for independent instructors but that won’t signal the end of the road for Enquiry Management.  Beyond that, we have several really exciting ideas which will simply blow your socks off…

As always, if you find any issues with this blog or anything else, please contact us at support@mydrivetime.co.uk.